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Laios was born hungry.
His mother often fondly recounted his infancy, consistently returning to the same tale- his endless thirst for milk. House guests always sunk their dulled canines into the story like a particularly loved chew toy, indulging in its an inevitable repeat. What Laios had noticed over the years was that she doesn’t mention that not much has changed. He’s still hungry.
Saturday brought another repetition of the story. Laios could hear the muffled laughter from the living room where his mother’s friends cackled at her unfortunate bovine role. With his mother busy entertaining and his sister wandering the village with her friends, thirteen year old Laios was left to his own devices. Ennui circled over him like a dark vulture.
With lack of anything better to do, he shimmied himself through the grimy bedroom window, an attempt to escape boredom’s grasp. He knew better than to show himself during Mother’s gathering to reach the front door. Still had the bruises to remind.
The window opened out onto an untrimmed weigela shrub with purplish flowers spotted throughout the foliage. While they all had long wilted into pitifully fragile crisps due to the sweltering summer heat, the leaves themselves were alive with movement as small six legged creatures zipped between them. Among the numerous arthropods lay a singular four legged creature. Laios couldn’t stop himself from smiling in excitement as he peered through the withered leaves.
“Hello!”
Presumably, the stoat did not answer back. Its beady black eyes locked onto Laios with an intensity reserved for the gaze of prey looking into the maw of a carnivore.
Laios wondered at it. Usually, stoats bolted as soon as his heavy footsteps lumbered close, the creature disturbed by the clumsy approach. It was then that Laios traced the line of the stoat’s neck down to its tawny body where the source of the issue laid. Its hind legs were brutally mangled. The injury seemed relatively fresh as it oozed blood like glittering rubies, each drop greedily catching the sun’s rays.
The left leg was barely hanging on to the rest of its frame by the virtue of four measly strings of pale red flesh not unlike the strands of an especially morbid violin. The right leg was gone entirely.
Laios found that the stoat’s raw, pink wound was a far more beautiful superior than the dull purple weigela flowers, whether they were withered or not.
His mother often lamented that neither of her children appreciated the simple beauty of a freshly bloomed lily or the well stitched hem of a petticoat. No matter what pretty bauble the woman waved in front of either of them, the concept never clicked for the Touden siblings. To Laios, the faded purple of weigelas’ could never compete with the raw beauty of freshly spilled blood.
Before he had the presence of mind to remember his mother’s long winded lecture about diseases and the like, his hand extended and stole the creature by its scruff. It yowled in distress, but its wound shackled it to weak struggling and slow claws. Laios carefully lifted the stoat to eyesight and felt a tickle in the back of his molars. Saliva pooled under his tongue as his stomach rumbled. The now direct exposure to the sun transformed the dark hue of its wounds into a deeper candy-red color reminiscent of melting gum drops. It reminded him of glistening mounds of caviar caught right after spawning season or frosted over red berries that had caught the winter sun’s rays.
The tickle in his molars erupted into horrible, relentless itching. Hunger. Lilting voices coaxed him to indulge, just a tad. His stomach was cramped in agitation after all. The shriveled sack carried nothing more than wild katniss he’d scavenged either in the morning. It wouldn’t hurt to only catch the wine-red juices trickling down the bodice of the stoat, dying its coat dark. One taste, one lick, one bite.
Laios parted his lips, his canines itching something horrible. They descended.. down.. down.. down…
“Laios! Laios! You troublesome child! Where are you?”
His teeth clinked closed as if they’d never separated.
He shakily dragged himself upright, barely remembering to dust off his pants. His mother didn’t like it when he tracked dirt indoors and said it was unbecoming of a young man. Unsure what had almost transpired, Laios drunkenly put one foot in front of the other in a mimicry of a foal’s first walk. He made it back to the window in a dizzied daze. He had never blinked once.
————-
12:30 AM and Laios was still tracing phantom patterns into the air. If he squinted his eyes just right he could barely make out the outline of a sprinting fawn in the popcorn texture of his poorly plastered ceiling. He liked to imagine himself crouching in thick stalks of grass on all fours to then pounce on his unsuspecting prey.
Sleep remained elusive as the smell of copper sat dormant in his mind. Perhaps all he needed was to escape the stifling atmosphere of his four walls. With too much excitement, he scrambled out onto the prickly grass.
And there it was.
Right where Laios left it, the stoat remained prone in pain. Worshipful hands reached out and cupped its small form. “Beautiful.”
His lips inevitably parted.
The first bite tasted like the sparkling, plump dew drops on a summer’s eve that explode with the rich soil’s greeting. He licked his chapped lips and thought nothing could matter more than this. Than sating this primal drive that demanded for ripped tendons and spilled viscera.
After a pause, more for the sake of savoring than pitying, he unhinged his jaw and descended once again. The yowl the creature let out would’ve tugged at his heartstrings if only he wasn’t so hungry. Laios promised himself that he’d bemoan its death later. When his empty stomach was warmed with what once breathed.
His canines gently scraped against the thinnest of ribs as he lapped, and Laios was sure the stoat received his love in every crunch. How could it not when it felt his fingers tremble where he grasped its twisting neck. His entire body trembled from not only oxygen deprivation, as his nose was kept submerged in its rended organs, but from pure untainted love.
He receded and took a breath of copper infused air. Laios knew that if his body did not force him, his nose would stay in the concave puddle of gore pooled in the remains forever. Until death do part. However, the knowledge that the stoat was now a part of him brought a level of comfort, of peace. Though Laios would never have claws to tear or fangs to flash, he would always carry the blood of an animal in his veins.
A deep breath and his rapidly bluing countenance left him as his body allowed him to enjoy his feast without further cajoling.
———
Later, the blonde drug his body through his window, stiff from kneeling for hours. He dropped into the bed as his mind buzzed. Something in him preened at the fresh blood staining his yellowed sheets and he immediately had to swallow bile. He promised himself it would be the last time.
It happened again.
And again.
And again.
He stopped feeling guilty around the tenth time.
———
The guilt came back with a spiteful vengeance when Falin discovered him within a shallow pool of blood and a much deeper well of depravity. It was during the middle of his sixty-first. He was crouched in the backyard garden with a lifeless hare religiously cradled in his arms.
Her widened eyes tracked the mess of blood, viscera, and fur staining his face, but she did not open her mouth to condemn. Instead, she gently pried the hare from his tacky grip and carved out a final resting spot with a rusting shovel and too kind heart while he sat in silence. He passed the time by observing the slowly growing pile of displaced soil counterbalancing the increasing number of dirt particles imbedded under his sister’s nails. She was finished before he the chance to decide whether he should think. The uneven patch of earth was flattened to the best of her ability, and Laios found it within himself to thank some nameless god that she didn’t mark the grave.
Falin turned back towards him with a tender smile that reached her eyes. It distracted him long enough to allow her fingers to reach behind his tongue and press. The resulting splash of foul smelling liquid burned on its arrival and long after. Some part of him cried for the hare’s purposeless end; most of him wanted to lap it back up. Rended chunks of undigested hare stared back at him as he sprinkled a layer of soil above the sick. He could do this much for Falin.
Despite the blood on his hands, Falin slipped hers through his and walked him back to the house while quietly recounting her discovery of a particularly pretty wildflower.
Laios thought he loved her enough to eat her.
———
The next morning he saw Falin picking out dirt from under her fingernails, and knew he couldn’t stay anymore. He told himself it was for her own good.
He left the next morning with nothing but the clothes on his back.
———
Under advice from a butcher who had discovered Laios feasting in his dumpster, the now-adult man joined the military.
Within days of enlistment, Laios and his regiment were sent deep into the unknown territory to gather information on the whereabouts of enemy troops.
Even there, Laios couldn’t resist.
A fellow solider chanced upon him during his eighty-third and Laios was left behind to die in the wilderness.
It seemed fitting he would die as he was born; hungry.